Limits Sought on Argentine Rights Cases

Appealing for national reconciliation, President Raul Alfonsin on Friday asked Congress to fix a time limit for making formal accusations of human rights abuses committed during Argentina’s “dirty war” of the 1970s.

Legislation prepared for a special session of Congress and made public Friday night would exempt from prosecution all members of the armed forces and security services not already indicted within 60 days of passage. It proposes a 30-day limit for presentation of new cases and would empower civilian courts to assume jurisdiction of those already before military judges, a move aimed at speeding up proceedings.

‘Not Easiest Course’

“It is absolutely essential to lay aside the differences that separate us. There cannot be one Argentina for civilians and one for the military,” Alfonsin said in an address broadcast nationwide Friday night. He acknowledged that his decision was “not the easiest course.”

Underlying the government action is a desire to mute anger and uncertainty among the officer corps of an armed forces that has borne the brunt of daily attack in a rigorous, three-year-long search for justice unprecedented in Latin America.

“By using the devil’s weapons to fight devils, Argentina became a hell,” Alfonsin said in referring to the “dirty war” against leftist terrorists. He insisted, though, that the human rights campaign has had lasting impact. “We have won the battle against impunity and violence, knowing that never again will we be afflicted by fanaticisms,” he asserted.

Appealing for national understanding of a controversial decision, Alfonsin said: “We cannot live chained to our past decadence. That’s why we are doing what we are doing. Now is the time for the future; the time of reunion for all Argentines.”

Alfonsin’s call for what is referred to here as the punto final, or full stop, for proceedings he initiated on taking office in 1983, was immediately denounced by human rights groups and the political left, which staged an emotional 24-hour protest march in an unsuccessful attempt to head it off.

“Apart from the moral aspects, this is a bad idea, a costly mistake. It will not reconcile the country but instead reduce political space hard-won by civilians in favor of the armed forces,” said Graciela Fernandez Meijide, a member of the government commission whose investigation of the “dirty war” is the basis for current legal action.

Scream at Judges

Three women human rights leaders screamed “Murderer! Monster!” on Friday when a panel of judges freed a navy officer charged with wounding and abducting Swedish-Argentine teen-ager Dagmar Hagelin in January, 1977. “Whores!” screamed friends and relatives of the officer, Lt. Alfredo Astiz, as police hustled the women from a downtown courtroom.

The three federal judges ruled that the existing six-year statute of limitations had lapsed on the charges of assault and kidnaping against Astiz, who has been a special target of human rights activists.

Astiz, who infiltrated human rights groups in the guise of a relative seeking a missing person, is liable to further prosecution in other cases stemming from the 1976-80 period of state terrorism during a military dictatorship.

2 Ex-Presidents Condemned

Seven senior military officers, including two former presidents, and three police officials have been condemned and six others have been acquitted by the federal appeals court that freed Astiz on Friday.

On Thursday, the court ordered prosecution of five generals and two colonels who held lower-ranking command positions between 1976 and 1978 in the army’s 1st Corps, which includes this capital city and the populous adjoining province of Buenos Aires. Charges against several hundred other officers are pending in thousands of often-overlapping cases before civilian and military courts.

By count of the special investigating commission created by Alfonsin’s government, at least 9,000 people still missing were kidnaped and killed during the armed forces’ repression of Marxist guerrillas. The guerrillas were wiped out, but more innocent victims like Hagelin than guerrillas died in clandestine detention centers under military authority where torture was a tool of interrogation.

To Expedite Caseload

On Friday, the court, which earlier in the week convicted Gen. Ramon Camps, an army general and former Buenos Aires province police chief, and four other defendants, said it would cancel the annual Southern Hemisphere summer judicial vacations this year to expedite its caseload.

In addition to the 1st Corps case, the court may try as many as 50 officers and noncoms accused of human rights violations at the Navy’s School for Mechanics. The white-painted, tree-shaded school was the most notorious clandestine detention center in the capital, and the one where Hagelin and two French nuns whom Astiz was accused kidnaping were last seen alive.

The government has the majority in the lower house of Congress needed to pass its proposed new legislation and seems likely also to carry the Senate, with aid from minor provincial parties.

“A person must be tried within a reasonable period or not at all,” said Rep. Juan Carlos Pugliese, president of the lower house and a member of Alfonsin’s ruling Radical Civic Union. “There’s no place in the world where a trial lasts more than three years. Besides, you can’t have the armed forces permanently up in the air.”

Concern is particularly acute among officers who held junior rank during the “dirty war” and who say they should not be tried for carrying out orders of their superiors.

‘Blind Obedience’

“Under the criterion of blind obedience, monstrous crimes were made possible,” the court nevertheless has found, noting that military regulations do not require the execution of illegal orders.

Defenders of accused officers argued that once they were forced to fight a war that they had not sought but which they had to win, the armed forces were justified in fighting fire with fire against terrorists who respected no rules.

In imposing a 25-year term against an unrepentant Camps, currently a 59-year-old cancer patient in a military hospital, the court, however, drew a clear distinction between terrorism and the state’s obligation in confronting it.

“When subversion produces terrorist attack, it attacks the state, but when the state does the same, it is destroying the pillars which sustain it,” the court held.

“It was argued here that in the face of Marxist subversion which wanted to seize power, the only recourse was a pitiless war, without quarter, and without law, but in reality there were other means such as a war within legal norms,” the court said in establishing precedent for its judgment of future cases.